But… Science!

But Liam! Science is so good! It’s given us… velcro! Vaccines! Longer life spans!!

Well…

There are 7 billion semi-diseased, pesticide-swilling, GMO eating human beings being irradiated in the world right now. There used to be a half billion relatively healthy people eating actual food. Is that an improvement?

Much to most of that 7 billion are on the cusp of a mass die-off because our food production system is entirely dependent on oil and gas – limited resources – which we pour on fields to make them produce nutritionless, disease-causing crops. The “scientific” pesticides that we pour into food create illness, not health.

Is that really an improvement?

Let me say: life is hard. It’s hard for tribal people. It was a challenge in the Middle Ages. We’ve covered that up with DDT and short-sighted dead-end experiments with petroleum that are already collapsing and will leave a vacuum that will cause mass famine and plague. (Uhm. Grow Food Locally Now.)

If you think the 20th/21st Century is much, much better than the 14th, let me offer this thought:

You could take away every single 19th and 20th Century “advance,” if you also took away every 19th and 20th Century detriment – and we’d be a better species:

the list of “scientific” atrocities is as endless as the fibs and lies of the church.

The Problem

Most people confuse tool-making with “science.” But science doesn’t exist outside of tool-making. We are naturally, as a species, tool-makers. You don’t need a special field of inquiry, protected by government “no sue” laws, to make that happen. We pick something up, we use it as a tool. Period. That’s the kind of monkey we are.

Yesterday’s tools were powered by muscle, and could only do so much damage. But today’s tools – aka science – is powered by OIL. Oil is worth tens of thousands of hours of human labor – per barrel. And we use 19 MILLION of those barrels per day.

The power of oil has made tool-making into a murder-suicide pact.

If you really look at it, you’ll be forced to admit that most tool-making is made for destructive purposes: Hunting, scraping, cracking, and killing. In the ancient world, we used tools to make shelters, hunt, kill and cook; we use our hands to make art and paint.

Tools aren’t evil, but their energy output – their destruction level – was limited by the engine: us. Now the engine is oil. That’s thousands to millions of energy equivalents to a human being – in a day’s barrel burn. What can we do with it? Make bombs. Kill millions. Poison billions.

And, of course, make Twinkies.

Myth-Making

“Tool making” is what everybody means, when they say “science.” But they don’t know it, because we’re also a myth-making species. And the current myth is that “science” is a good thing. Or that it’s the best thing. But it’s just another religion; but it’s one that conflates its myth with a little math and engineering. Most of it is bunk, but they do a trick with numbers and impress the rubes.

We don’t need a venerated protected field of “science.” We’re already naturally tool makers. Science dresses up this endless murder parade in white gloves, and makes people think it’s respectable.

But it’s just another church – dishonest, telling huge lies that flatter its disgraceful history – and just beyond the thin veneer of iPod Plastic and brushed aluminum, science in its metal heart is full of nuclear fuel, weapons, and poisonous vaccines to cow those who disagree.

Go camping. Plant a garden. Be happy for plumbing (that’s engineering, which is tool-making), and stop worshiping science. It doesn’t deserve it any more than any other religion.

Science is about more than making tools. Science is also useful for making decisions about whether to use tools or not, about what we might expect in the future with this or that behavior. Science is looking at physical cause and effect relationships with everything, and predicting what will happen with them.
For quite some time, many people have been thinking that their expectations about the future with technology, were scientific. Even some scientists have talked this way, while others haven’t. Observations by scientists writing things like “The Limits to Growth”, have been ignored, because people have said that it doesn’t apply to us, because we have found ways around limits in the past with science, so we will do it again. But this is not a scientific belief. It is a superstitious belief about the capabilities of science. Science can’t find things that might exist only in the imagination. Science is about cause and effect relationships, and there is no cause and effect relationship between what was found in the past, and what might be found in the future.
If people respected science, they would have respected “Limits to Growth”. They would have respected older observations that amount to the same thing. People haven’t respected science, but they have had no problem being confused about what is scientific and what isn’t. Scientists often warn about confusing correlation with causation- and I think a lot of them have fallen into this trap, even knowing it is a dangerous thing to do. People want to believe that pleasant things will continue to go on being pleasant, even when they logically, scientifically, won’t. It is like drug addiction…
Lots more about this in several essays in my facebook page notes. This is the one I’d start with: https://www.facebook.com/notes/arthur-noll/principles-for-society/620759847984567

I AM old enough to remember when what we call “science” didn’t have the nearly untouchable religious reverence in our culture/society that it currently holds. There’s a new teevee show on satellite, where the host supposedly “debunks” all sorts of myths. One of those myths – on the commercial, anyway, is GMO foods. He says with a completely straight face to a woman sitting on a park bench that it’s been “proven” that GMO foods are safe and/or “no different” than their natural counterparts. How has it been “proven”?

This is the sort of societal and cultural programming that’s been going on since I can remember. I’ll admit to being open to it, when I was a kid, since I wasn’t open to going to church and being told a big guy in the sky made everything, along with all the other stories attached to that mythology. “Science” seemed like a much less dogmatic way of looking at “things” way back in the day…

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Before there is anything and beneath everything - is mystery. As soon as you name it, you lose it. As soon as you define it, it disappears. The reality: we can't know the eternal; we can only live in a system of the gentlest ethics: Be kind to others, try to do no harm to people and the world.